December 20, 2017

Direct participation in governance has experienced a
resurgence in the past decade. Rather than assuming their elected leaders will
represent their interests, people begin to practice democracy by taking direct
control over their own affairs. This government by the people rather than by experts or the social elites who are often successful in elections reshapes what democracy
means. In this resurgence democracy comes to mean decision-making about one’s
own affairs.

One trace of this resurgence is found in the Direct
Democracy Festivals that have taken place each year since 2010 in Greece and
other locations. These festivals provide a platform for an exchange of
experiences, strategies, and knowledge about direct participation in democratic
practice among those with experience in direct democracy, and allows locals
without experience to learn a great deal very quickly.

The first
festival took place on the Greek Aegean Coast and featured public
discussions ranging from local self-organized institutions to horizontal
governance practices and autonomous workers organizations. The 2016
festival was held in the capital of the Basque region in Spain, and
included discussions of differences between elections and citizen initiatives,
and the uses and risks of social media and other digital tools for expanding
direct democracy. The 2017
Direct Democracy Festival featured presentations on establishing and
strengthening the commons, on social movements taking power back from
authoritarian governments, strategies and concepts useful in local settings,
documentary films, theater, and musical performances.

Tied to the 2017 Direct Democracy Festival in Greece was a conference of participants in various
direct democracy social movements and organizations at the Transnational
Institute of Social Ecology. For example, United Cities and Local
Governments (UCLG) is one organization that has been promoting direct
democracy through their Committee
on Social Inclusion, Participatory Democracy, and Human Rights. The
conference featured a speaker discussing the efforts to implement direct local
governance across the entire Poitou-Charentes region of France, among many
other similar global efforts. UCLG networks many local governments to
establish local accountability for policies, and it has been successful in
strengthening resistance in many locales to economic and political policies
that benefit only a small minority of national, state or provincial, and local
populations.

Participatory governance often is adopted when those who are
systematically blocked from decision-making by government practices take
matters into their own hands: the unemployed, undocumented immigrants, young
people, and other groups. Participatory budgeting has been one of the most
successful practices in the spread of participatory governance. Beginning in
the 1990s, participatory budgeting has come to be widely used in over 100
cities in Brazil, and by 2015 it has also spread globally
to over 1,000 locations. The sites where this practice has proven effective
range from cities of over 1,000,000, such as Porto Alegre, Brazil, where it was
first used in 1989 on a large scale, to entire regions and states: the
Dominican Republic now uses participatory budgeting for all local governments.

One of the most important impacts of direct participation in
governance decision-making is the training of young people in citizenship
practices. Some practices have focused on participation by youth, and New York
City’s expansion of participatory budgeting from 4 council districts to over 30
in 2015-6 invites any person over age 14
to get involved. Since passive populations have proven vulnerable to persuasion
by elected leaders who have only narrow interests at heart, training younger
generations how to become actively involved in determining their lives is an
important countermeasure to centralized, elite government.

One disadvantage of participatory budgeting in some locales
has been the limitation of the practice to discretionary funds of elected
officials, as in Chicago and New York City. This does little to transform overall
unemployment rates based on economic policies, or the inhumane conditions of
many immigrants who are blocked from access to basic needs and safe living and
working conditions in many cases.

Yet direct participation in democracy decision-making has
wide appeal, and practiced in areas ranging well beyond budgets to such issues
as access to basic services, gender equality, environmental protection, and
poverty reduction. Studies have been completed of successes and obstacles in
these areas in over 50 cities
worldwide, and the results provide a rich resource for those who wish to
take control of their lives into their own hands.

The risk that elected officials take in
promoting participatory governance is that those who elected them may grow
accustomed to being directly involved in governing their own affairs. While the
claim by elected officials to represent the interests of all still has traction
in some circles, as more lose faith in electoral systems the experience of self-determination
may prove useful in the future. Direct democracy festivals and the work of the
UCLG offer those interested in direct participation in democracy much to
consider and more to do.

October 23, 2017

Mass assemblies are important sites for political action,
yet they often are represented as if they are secondary to established
political institutions. Political activists and theorists have begun to
reconsider their importance with the major successes of assemblies in Argentina
in the first decade of the new millennium, in Tahrir Square protests in 2011
and 2013, in the 2011-12 Occupy movement in North America and Europe, in the
15-M or Indignado movement in 2011 Spain, and in recent anti-austerity
movements in Greece and other nations.

Particularly when these
meetings make important decisions, they present a site for democracy or
rule by the people. In some recent reconsiderations, however, mass assemblies
are considered only in more limited instances when mass protests claim to speak
for the people to the liberal or autocratic nation-state. Disagreement about
whether mass assemblies are sites for political decision-making or simply sites
for expressing political views to the nation-state is one of the central
debates in these recent theoretical rethinking of the mass assembly.

Outside of electoral defeat and armed movements or coups,
mass protests seem to be one of the few ways to produce regime change. Even when
elected leaders attempt to ignore the public statements of massed protestors,
as recently seen in Egypt and Argentina the assembled populace may still
overthrow governments and make known their will.

In Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Assembly (2015)
and Judith Butler’s Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015),
the narrow focus on mass protests assumes that the political is only carried
out by the nation-state, or even that democracy can only take place when
addressing the liberal electoral nation-state. Yet many activists in social
movements increasingly called horizontal
movements practice what they call democracy using mass assemblies in venues
and locales well beyond the limits of the nation-state. Theorists are also
responding to this understanding of democracy as possible in sites Other to the
nation-state, such as Rodrigo Nunes in his 2014 publication, Organization of
the Organizationless, and Joe Parker in his Democracy Beyond the State:
Practicing Equality (2017).

Unlike much writing in political theory, many of these
recent theoretical reconsiderations of mass assembly takes as their main
audiences the general public. Rodrigo Nunes’s Organization
of the Organizationless (2014) is an important theoretical intervention in
debates about how decentralized, non-hierarchical organizations succeed. For
Nunes, decentralized democratic organizing can resist the ingrained tendency in
many to return to centralized, vertically organized structures by following
specific practices in certain key areas: running and documenting meetings;
decision-making; and actions. By diffusing information frequently, providing
equal access to resources, and frequently rotating tasks (including
leadership), Nunes argues
that the power that tends to collect around a limited number of individuals can
be persistently redistributed. Rather than assuming democracy is only found in
one type of organization, he argues that democracy instead is a practice
permanently open to different future forms that must constantly move between the
determined character of “horizontalism” and the indeterminate, the unknown of decentralized
open space.

Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini focus on
assembly-based horizontalist structures found throughout the first two
decades of the twenty-first century in their They Can't Represent Us: Reinventing Democracy from
Greece to Occupy(2014).
Recognizing the increasing alienation from elected leaders in many
nation-state, they document the mass assemblies used in environmental defense
assemblies and towns in Argentina, Zapatista autonomy in Chiapas, the Occupy
Plataforma (housing defense) movement in Spain, and assembly movements in
Greece. Sitrin is well-known for documenting the assembly and other horizontal
practices in post-2001 Argentina in her earlier books, Horizontalism: Voices
of Popular Power in Argentina and Everyday Revolutions. Their
analysis focuses on ways that the mass assembly reshapes individual
subjectivity in its rejection of electoral leadership institutions.

Unlike Nunes and Sitrin/Azzellini, Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a
Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) centers her theoretical reflections
on mass protests. Butler turns away from politics as monopolized by political
parties and governments to analyze the power of embodied, assembled collectives
to both make statements and produce conditions that provide for the most
vulnerable in society. As many governments have followed neoliberal policies
taking corporate profits as more important than the survival needs of “the
people,” mass assemblies have become key leverage points where the collective
body can reclaim the political for equality and the interdependence of the common
good. This is a major shift in thinking about the political, for the mass
assemblies in Butler’s view not only sever relations with extant regimes but
also install new conditions for the political and new rights, such as “the
right to appear” or “the right to persist” and survive as a living, vulnerable
being.

In breaking with the assumption that government policies are
the primary site for expressing the popular will, Butler provides the important
recognition that policy makers are often captured by narrow interests that do
not serve the common good. Since this
is a central problem in electoral democracies, this break makes it possible
to question the effectiveness of electoral governments at representing popular
opinion and the popular will. In moving away from liberal individualism and
towards collective rights and embodied political claims outside those of the
nation-state, Butler questions widely held assumptions about social contracts,
individual rights, and territorial nationalisms. As even elected governments
worldwide demonstrate again and again that they would prefer to protect small
group interests, particularly those of the wealthy, rather than those that are
vulnerable, populist parties and mass assemblies have begun to grow in strength
and effectiveness.

While Butler does not respond to Nunes or Sitrin, she does
draw on Jason Frank’s Constituent Moments (2010) and John
Inazu’s influential Liberty’s Refuge: the Forgotten Freedom of
Assembly (2012) to argue that mass
gatherings can displace the nation-state. Mass assemblies do so as an
embodied source of authoritative statements by “the people” with significance
well beyond individual rights of assembly or free speech. Butler also follows
Hagar Kotef’s important attack in Movement
and the Ordering of Freedom(2015) on the liberal mechanisms and
technologies for surveilling and managing mass mobilities, practices that are
supported by Hobbes and Locke in early theories of democracy and by Mill and
Habermas in the twentieth-century. Assemblies in the views of these
commentators and historians provide alternatives to those who wish not only to
make their views known but to establish conditions under which all may survive
and persist.

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt are skeptical that
assemblies can provide lasting solutions and durable social structures in their
2015 book, Assembly,
without an established leadership. Negri and Hardt assume that assembly-based
movements without the centralized leadership structures that they support do
not endure, cannot respond quickly to urgent developments, and cannot draw on
sophisticated technical resources. Yet in these criticisms of horizontal
structures, Negri and Hardt fall into many of the mythologies used to dismiss
assembly movements among social scientists who cannot conceive of politics
outside the nation-state. As Francesca Polletta has shown in her important
study of assembly movements in the United States civil rights era, Freedom
is an Endless Meeting, these myths hold only when the social scientist or
theorist ignores such influential organizations as the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee or Students for a Democratic Society. In their
assumption that self-governance institutions require technical experts at the
helm, Negri and Hardt also perhaps unwittingly reproduce the views of Joseph Schumpeter
and F.A. Hayek, the founders of neoliberalism that Negri and Hardt criticize
elsewhere in their book.

Negri and Hardt’s theoretical proposal is to subordinate leaders
to the assembled multitudes, to make them servants who operate the machinery of
government for the self-organized masses. Hardt and Negri emphasize the desire
of the multitudes for not only abstract freedoms and equality but also concrete
well-being and wealth, relations of access and use for all. In approaching the
political in its relations with the economic and the social, Hardt and Negri
foreground the importance of production and the growing commons. Ultimately
their book develops a proposal to construct organization without hierarchy and
create institutions without centralization, a major break with modern political
logic.

While Hardt and Negri do not respond in a substantive way to
the other theorists discussed above, they clearly take as their primary
opponent those who would dare attempt to organize without an established
leadership at the helm. Given the importance of leaderless movements for events
in Argentina,
North America and Europe,
Hardt and Negri show their allegiance to the vertical hierarchies that
established leaders implant into any organization. Some long-established
communities and organizations centering on assembly practices have
determined that the best balance of horizontal equality with vertical relations
installed by leaders is achieved with frequent rotation of leaders. While this
may prevent any individuals or small groups from establishing entrenched
positions needed for clientelism and other common political problems, it also
disrupts the rule by experts that Hardt and Negri seem to support.

This may be
why Hardt and Negri overlook the many durable organizations that have taken
assemblies as their base: the Workers Landless Movement in Brazil, the small
farmer global network known as La Via Campesina, and other organizations. While
they mention in passing the Zapatistas in southern Mexico, who use assembly
practices as one anchor for autonomous government (with the EZLN military as
the other anchor), Negri and Hardt’s overall argument does not respond to the
decade of Zapatista success at a decentralized assembly-based social movement.

Hardt and Negri point out that electoral politics is an
institution that is coming to an end. In their view representative systems are
enduring a crisis brought on by decisions of elected leaders to turn their
backs on the middle classes in favor of neoliberal domestic policies of
austerity and budget cuts. As voter alienation increases, far right populist
movements have gained electoral successes in many electoral democracies.

Mass assembly-based institutions provide an
important alternative to increasingly conservative electoral modes of
democratic practice. The debates seen in Nunes and Sitrin and Butler and
Parker’s writings on mass assembly modes of political decision-making show what
the future holds beyond electoral democracy. As nationalism’s claim to “the
people” weakens, other politics are possible. These works show that not only
are mass assemblies possible, but they are already at work all over the world.

August 31, 2017

There are many
organizations that practice decentralized, horizontal forms of democracy. These
democratic practices differ significantly from the democracies that often serve
as the norm for all democracy: electoral constitutional governments. Unlike elected
representative governments, these
organizations reject rule by college-educated, specialized experts to find ways
to keep governance accountable to those who have little power in social
relations, economic life, and national political systems.

Slum Dwellers
International (SDI) and their offshoot organization, Know Your City, are organizations
that have worked intentionally to decentralize their practices and resources,
their knowledge base and their governance. Since 1996, this network has helped
to create a global
voice of the urban poor, engaging international agencies and operating on
the international stage in order to support and advance local struggles.
Nevertheless, the principal theatre of practice for SDI’s constituent
organisations is the local level: the informal settlements where the urban poor
struggle to build more inclusive cities, economies, and politics. By bringing
together the urban poor in 32 countries and hundreds of cities and towns across
Africa, Asia and Latin America, the Slum Dwellers, SDI has expanded to many
countries: Ghana, India, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia,
Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe,
among others.

Organizationally SDI consists of a
Secretariat, a coordinating team, a Board and a Council of Federations. The
Secretariat has an administrative and management function. It is accountable to
a Board and a Council of Federations made up of nominated grassroots leaders
from affiliated Federations. The Board also nominates a Coordinating team that
serves as an executive, responsible for overseeing the implementation of SDI
programs.

SDI is committed to supporting a process that
is driven from below. The Secretariat facilitates, and sometimes resources,
horizontal exchange and information sharing programs among member Federations. These
exchanges also
produce a strong sense that expertise is found locally among the urban slum
residents, and not just among professional policy and “development” experts.

Sheila Patel
writes in her document, “Understanding the Governance Structures of SDI,” how accountability
by and for the informal urban poor works in SDI. It began in India where the National
Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan established national networks and
federated slum dwellers throughout the country, and then expanded to work with
South African slum dwellers in 1991. From 1992-1996 the two federations worked
together to establish developed a set of methodologies that provided realistic
alternatives to evictions and, by extension, practical and sustainable ways of
mobilizing and organizing the urban poor. This period they also worked with
urban poor from other countries to establish similar organizations, as in
Cambodia and Zimbabwe. Starting in 1996, the emerging federations began to
select coordinators and to expand to Latin America.

In 2002 they
selected their first international Board for the transnational organization,
and began to develop an emerging management committee. By 2006 pressures had
intensified from external funders and other organizations to centralize. Patel writes that “As SDI grew
at settlement level, at national level and globally, the financial requirements
increased and external agencies needed to feel reassured that the organization
could fulfill its expectations and commitments. This called for greater
centralization but principles of decentralization and subsidiarity are fundamental
to SDI's bottom-up structure. Decentralization demanded a much wider base of
leaders to assist federations with increasing demands and expectations.
Subsidiarity posed special challenges to a Secretariat that was becoming
increasingly professionalized and accountable to external agencies - especially
foundations, bi-lateral and multi-lateral agencies.” The SDI response was to
establish a Council with three representatives from each fully-active
federation in different countries, and to draw on this Council for Board
members going forward. Then in 2008 SDI launched a funding organization of its
own with a Board of Governors to administer the funds, with members of the
Board of Governors including National Housing and Urban Development ministers
from representative countries.

At the same
time that this centralization took place, SDI also established five regional
hub organizations to strengthen local leadership and regional ties. To practice
its principle of abdication from professional to local federation management,
they also worked from 2013-16 to establish a Management Committee to retain
accountability to the national federations. These efforts have taken time, yet
they work against the centralized structures demanded by outside funders and
other civil society organizations to retain a decentralized structure with local
accountability.

There are
several other ways in which SDI governs their own affairs without following the
centralized practice of their home governments, including those national
governments where they are based that claim to be democratic. First, a careful
adherence to peer-to-peer exchanges between urban poor community members in
different locales and even different nations prevents “experts” from effectively
becoming a governing elite. This practice blocks the emergence of entrenched
policy specialists who often pursue their own narrow interests rather than the
interests of marginalized and impoverished community members.

Local
funding of initiatives through savings plans prevents s the centralized
distribution of tax monies and other resources from being monopolized by
elected leaders distant from the urban slum communities and their interests. SDI’s
goals are to serve the poorest of the poor, which centralized national governments
have often not been able to serve effectively. Even areas that practice
democracy through elected governments have found that wealth and power
inequalities remain, and democracy does not mean a reduction in inequality. So
if informally organized urban slum communities wish to take their lives into
their own hands, SDI provides one means to do so.

Note: Thank you to Jamie Helberg for
research assistance on this post.